Tucson Station Cancels Newscast, Lays Off Staff

Just how bad is the news business? Well in Tucson it’s apparently bad enough that the local Fox affiliate decided to cancel it’s local news broadcasts and lay off the news team comprising of some 40-50 people.

The station known as Fox 11 will contract with local CBS affiliate KOLD to produce the local news broadcasts beginning Feb 1.

Underlying the basic economics of the move it also reflects on the state of the news business in Tucson with some of the soon to be laid off staffers having come from other media organizations like the Tucson Citizen and Journal Broadcast Group when they made cutbacks.

According to the Tucson Sentinel a source told them that the reason for the layoffs was due to a lack of advertising revenues.

That is probably true as even larger news organizations been suffering from a dearth of advertising as the economy continues to stumble along but may also may be due to the rise of citizen journalism.

Last Friday CNN issued pink slips to 50 employees citing technological advances that allows just about anyone to report the news with a hand held camera negating the need for full-time photojournalists and editors.